THE "NEED" TO MINE: SUPPLY CHAIN DYNAMICS AND EXTRACTIVE ETHICS IN CLIMATE ACTION

Pressure to replace energy infrastructures with zero-emission alternatives has led to widespread discourse of a “need” to produce the materials to create new technologies, like electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, and solar photovoltaics. Approaching this discourse from an analysis of recent interactions between the battery industry and mining industry, this presentation seeks to introduce complexity into the assumptions that climate action necessitates more mining. It leverages interviews done over the last several years with mining companies, battery scientists, human rights activists, and people living close to mines in DRC, Indonesia, and Brazil. This presentation seeks to challenge not whether certain climate technologies are needed (although that is a valid question), but rather the relationship between mining certain materials, the build-out of technology innovations, and climate goals. Employing the conceptualization of a researcher-activist who elevated concerns about child labor in Congolese cobalt production to a global conversation, I theorize that uncoordinated attempts to address social and environmental problems in mining for battery materials has led to a “whack-a-mole” situation in which battery designers respond to volatile reputations of particular minerals. This dynamic upends the common notion that consumers and electric vehicle companies “demand” certain products from the “supply” of mineral production, as if “the tail is wagging the dog,” in the words of one materials scientist with decades of experience designing lithium-ion batteries. If consumer products are shaped by actions (or lack of action) upstream, the “need” for particular batteries and amounts of minerals ignores the ability of the mining industry to influence what is consumed and what climate action looks like. The presentation concludes on notes about how the “need” discourse impacts climate action by way of its universalization of approaches and responsibility, conflation of rationales for necessity and for operations, disregard for alternatives, misplaced market leverage, and indifference to adaptability. It also poses a question in the spirit of this new framing: how have current and persistent systems of material extraction and use shaped solutions to environmental problems?